The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to management of prices of goods and services in electronic marketplaces and/or online stores and, more specifically, but not exclusively, to dynamically re-pricing in real time the goods and services offered on electronic marketplaces and/or online stores.
Electronic commerce (e-Commerce) in general and electronic marketplaces in particular serves as a platform through which third-party merchants (sellers and/or vendors) may offer products and/or services to consumers. The electronic marketplaces may be utilized through on-line systems available to the sellers and the consumers through a plurality of interfaces, for example, client application and/or web browser based service that execute on a one or more of a plurality of client terminals, for example, Smartphone, tablet, work station, desktop computer and/or laptop computer. The electronic marketplaces, for example, Amazon Marketplace, eBay Marketplace and/or Sears Marketplace, provide sellers with access to large consumer traffic for a fee and/or a percentage of the sales made through the electronic marketplace. The marketplace may offer the sellers additional services, for example, billing, shipping and/or advertising.
The electronic marketplaces are highly competitive arenas in which many sellers operate and offer the same item (product and/or service). In case the same item is offered by multiple sellers, the electronic marketplace system automatically orders the presentation of offers from sellers to a potential consumer in a prioritized manner, for example according to the rank of the sellers. Highest ranking offers get to appear higher in a list and therefore get more exposure from offers from other sellers. This exposure increases the chance of winning the deal. In some electronic marketplaces, for example, Amazon Marketplace, the highest ranking offer gets to be selected as the default seller. The default seller, for example, the buy box winner on the Amazon Marketplace, gets to be the one to close the deal when the consumer selects to make a purchase of the offered item, for example, through the “add to cart” option and/or through the “buy it now” option. It is therefore, desired for the sellers to get high ranking for their offer in order to get best exposure which may result in winning many sale transactions and increasing sales and profit.
The set of rules by which the electronic market place system ranks the offers made by the sellers relies on a set of criteria which may be unpublished and/or unknown to the public. The set of criteria may include a plurality of criterion for the product, for example, price, availability, shipping details and/or number of reviews, and/or a plurality of criterion for the seller, for example, sales history, consumers' rating, credibility and/or number of returned items. The criterions may be weighted so as to have different influence of each of the criteria on the ranking of the offers.
The sellers may manipulate the prices of the items they offer for sale in order to increase their sales and/or profits. Reducing the price may result in getting high ranking and higher volume of sales but may also result in loss in profitability. Increasing the price may result in the seller dropping in ranking and probably winning less deals. The optimal price may be set according to a plurality of attributes of the items offered for sale and/or attributes of the sellers. However, the price of the item(s) will typically have the highest immediate impact on the ranking of the offer made by a seller. As the electronic marketplace may be a dynamic place, the prices of an item offered by multiple sellers may vary.
Dynamic pricing of items on electronic marketplaces may be done manually by a seller who is continuously following the trade activity of the item on the electronic marketplace and adjusts the price accordingly. Some solutions may be available in which a seller may define a set of rules by which the price of an item may be adjusted over time. However these solutions usually employ a static set of rules which do not adapt to the changing conditions on the trade of the item. The rules defined in these sets of rules are also usually independent of each other and may not be able to serve a comprehensive sales strategy. Furthermore, some of the electronic marketplaces provide limited access to pricing information of competitor sellers, thus reducing the effectiveness of the static set of rules. In addition the system for ranking the offers of the sellers may not be fully deterministic in order to provide equal opportunity to several sellers by selecting a different default seller for a specific item during consecutive views of the item by consumers.